7/30/2019 Walls Essay

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Examine how walls order urban space

Walls are the simplest, oldest and cheapest tool of defence and segregation, and in a

world characterised by threats, they become the first response (Scranton 2007: 277)

This essay focuses specifically on contemporary cases of recently emergent walls to

examine just how their intended formations and consequent affects are ultimately

ordering the fragmentation of urban space through rigid territorialization and restrictedmobility. The proliferation of fortified enclaves of Los Angeles, Sao Paulo and Moscow,

and the military walls of the Baghdad occupation are all specific in context but

generalizable because they derive from the resources and for the purposes of those withconsiderable political and economic power. These walls embody defensible spaces and

make social distance as they create metaphorical and real barriers to de-intensify the

intersections of a socially differentiated urbanity. Firstly, I argue for the importance ofunderstanding the reasons behind the original materialization of walls by attending to the

discourses and perceptions of the groups who make them. Then I apply some of Lathamand McCormack conceptual vehicles to become implicated in, the excessive force of

(walls) materiality (2004: 707) to demonstrate how the walls have an agency of theirown that influences the order of urban space by exacerbating the problems it was made to

solve. Finally, I place the reality of these walls into Grahams work on the new military

urbanism to consolidate the paradoxical dilemma that such formations provide for urbanliberalism.

First Point:

There is an endless multiplicity of contexts in which the materialemergence of each enclaves has occurred, however there are general

themes and tendencies which can be deduced from the discourses and

interpretations that connect to their materialisation.

They are created to solve a problem, and then that problem is then multiplied and then

defined by the wall itself.

To understand how a wall orders urban space we have to understand why it was built byand what discourses influenced these. However, once it comes into its own, it has a life ofits own and they actually deepen and create division.

The first part will explain how we must understand the immaterial processes and

discourses, which have imprinted themselves onto the material formation of walls in

urban space. This essay will focus on some of the most contemporary formations of

7/30/2019 Walls Essay

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walls. Including, the proliferation of postmodern condiments in Sao Paulo, Los Angeles

and Moscow, which can be related to one another in analysis because they are deliberate

attempts by the political and economic elite to sustain defensible space, offering securityand social homogenization. Analysis is widened by examining the use walls by the elites

of Israel in Jerusalem and the United States in Baghdad. Once examining the processes

which led to the initial materialization of walls, the second part will show how the wallsmateriality then has a life of its own and excacerbates problems.

Though walls intend to order urban space, they are a primitive device. And increase

inequalities.

political elite in

to occupy urban space during cross-cultural

widen the analysis

yes they are built for the purpose of creating order

but no they end up not doing it.